As an avowed atheist living among a sea of believers (both locally and on the Internet), I have spent a lot of time discussing my beliefs (or lack thereof, as the case may be). The purpose of this blog is not to prove the non-existence of God or "de-convert" anybody from their faith, but simply to preserve some of these discussions and allow me to flesh them out through the process of writing them down, as well as to share them with anybody who might be interested in reading them.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Is There Such a Thing as “Objective” Morality?

[Note: I have previously written about what morality means to an atheist here: On Morality. Here I discuss the claim by theists that they -- and they alone -- have access to a set of "objective" moral principles.]

For
any sort of moral principles to be objective, they would have to be
unchanging and apply to all people in all circumstances. One way to
possibly have some sort of objective morality would be to have it
imposed from an external source such as a God of some sort, in which
case morality becomes whatever that God says to do or not do.
Unfortunately, even if you believe in a God of some sort (which I
don’t), using a God as the source of objective morality quickly becomes
an exercise in futility because:

Nobody can agree upon what, exactly, God has said to do and not do, even among members of the same religious communities.

Many
of the things God supposedly told his children to do and not do
thousands of years ago seem to have been tailored specifically for the
culture in which his children lived back then [Gee, an “objective”
morality that changes over time, go figure…].

God apparently
refuses to provide any clarification today to clear up the various
misinterpretations regarding his moral principles.

Another
way to possibly have some sort of objective morality is to claim that
there are fundamental laws of nature that somehow dictate what is “good”
and “bad” when it comes to how we treat our fellow man. I know a number
of atheists who really try to make this argument, presumably so that
they can silence the theists who keep claiming that atheists can’t be
moral since they have no basis for objective morality. I’m not swayed by
this, however.

First of all, I’m not at all
swayed by the claim that objective morality is even needed in the first
place to be moral. Morality is a set of principles that govern how we
act toward one another, and one can follow those principles regardless
of whether those principles are based on some “objective” or “absolute”
standards or laws.

Second of all, I’m not
convinced that there are any absolute natural laws or principles that
determine (or can be used to determine) whether our actions are
objectively “good” or “moral”. At most, I think that humans have, on the
whole, an innate sense of empathy toward each other that tends to make
us feel happy when others are happy and sad when others are sad, and
that can certainly for the basis of a general principle of “treat others
the way you want to be treated,” but that only goes so far. That innate
empathy often only extends to members of our immediate family or tribe,
and sometimes doesn’t even go that far. It is also possible to derive
some general moral principles from our long experience with civilization
and our experimental discovery of what sorts of laws best help a
society to run smoothly. Once again, though, I hesitate to call these in
any way “objective” or “absolute” since so many different societies and
cultures throughout recorded history have come up with radically
different laws.

The closest thing to any sort
of “objective” morality I think we could ever really come up with is the
simple realization that all humans are equally deserving of the same
respect simply be virtue of being human. Different actions and
situations may warrant different treatment, but the underlying principle
of respect would remain a constant.